Sunday Volunteering at the Maryland Zoo

Some photos of Tuffy, our 41-year-old Bull male African Elephant schmoozing with guests and a volunteer deer during Breakfast with the Elephants.  A great opportunity for Guests to get a closer and more in-depth experience with one of our many species at the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore.

 

Seasonal Move: There's a Chill in the Air

 Time to transfer all of my tropical plants inside.  Step 1 - prep my little Sun Room.

Step two move the children inside!

Signature Theatre: Primary Trust

 My faith in contemporary American theatre has been completely restored by Eboni Booth's, 2024 Pulitzer Prize winning play, "Primary Trust."  The heart of the play is Kenneth.  A man whose childhood was so traumatic that he created an imaginary friend named Bert.  For 20 years, since aging out of the child protective services boys home, he's worked in a little bookstore run by a curmudgeonly old man, Sam.  One day Sam tells him he's selling the store and moving to Arizona.  The last day is in two weeks and he gives Kenneth three months worth of pay to help him until he can find a new job.  Besides the bookstore, 6 to 7 days a week, Kenneth spends his evenings at Wally's--a local Tiki Bar--drinking Mai Tai's with "Bert" until the bar-tender cuts him off.  

All of this is just the set up.  The play is about how, over the next year, Kenneth discovers an inner resilience supported by occasional acts of kindness and punctuated by his ongoing struggle with mental wellness.  THIS IS THE BEST contemporary play of this type, I've ever seen.  It's better than "Dot," better than "Proof," and, yes, better than "The Waverly Gallery."  It is genuine in a way that was magical.  While not meant to be comic, there are moments that are so funny, so unexpected that I laugh without discretion.  And there are moments when I let the tears run down my cheeks, too.  It was, in short, an authentic experience for me.

The cast is magnificent.  But the star, Julius Thomas III is truly a star.  Fresh off a turn as A. Hamilton on Broadway, his list of credits on the "Great White Way" is long and impressive.  It took him a mere 3 minutes to have me utterly and totally in his pocket.  He commanded the performance and had a supporting cast that was game for the adventure.  Together they transformed a spare little peninsula of stage into a world of grace with imperfect triumphs of hope and joy and resilience.  

Where the story begins, Julius Thomas III as Kenneth

Mai Tai's at Wally's with Bert (Frank Britton)--who isn't there.

Finding a new job at Primary Trust Bank, with a new boss, Clay (Craig Wallace)

Drinks with a new friend, Corrina (Yesenia Iglesias)

Standing unaware on a precipice with Bert who's about to say good-bye.

Where the story is, one year later.

Poem: Haiku - Red Geranium

 

Maryland Zoo: Aviary

In the heart of the African Water Hole and Grasslands area of the zoo sits the African Aviary.  The Aviary is built around an ancient White Oak.  It's an immersive habitat where guests can enter and walk on boardwalks among the 12 species of birds.

Von Der DECKEN'S HORNBILL

Tockus deckeni

(female)

HADADA IBIS

Bostrychia hagedash

HADADA IBIS mate roosting on their nest

WHITE-BREASTED CORMORANT

Phalacrocorax lucidus

SPUR-WINGED LAPWING

Vallenus spinosus

AFRICAN SPOONBILL

Platalea alba

There were four African Spoonbills in the Aviary and this one was particularly curious about me.  I'm not saying he was "friendly."  There is no evidence to suggest that birds are ever friendly, that's a human emotion.  While some birds can act like friends to humans, they do not possess the intelligence to behave like friends.  Companions, even flock-mates, but friendship isn't an accurate description of avian behavior.  And I was also quite curious about him--a true meeting of the minds.

FULVOUS WHISTLING DUCK

Dendrocygna bicolor

WHITE-FACED WHISTLING DUCK

Dendrocygna viduata

MARBLED TEAL

Marmaronetta angustirostris

Ford's Theater: Mr. Lincoln

 "Mr. Lincoln" by Herbert Mitgang is a one man show in which the Actor, using a majority of Abraham Lincoln's own words, tells the story of his life.  It's a beautifully conceptualized play whose content (the words of Abraham Lincoln himself) resounds with profound truths for our present day political milieu.  We learn of his days in Illinois as a lawyer and young politician, his courtship and love for Mary Todd, the births and tragic deaths of most of his sons.  The campaign for the presidency, the war, his rocky relationships with his generals, his compassion for troops that deserted...the emancipation of enslaved Africans, right up to premonitions of his death just days before his assassination.  

At 69, Scott Bakula was born to play Lincoln.  From the first words to the final applause, he projected America's tragic "Everyman" President with wit, and pathos, and compassion.  I could not stop my eyes from leaking at his recitation of The Gettysburg Address.  After the standing ovation faded at the end of the performance, Bakula turned to look up upon the very theatre box in which Lincoln was shot, clasped his hands and bowed his head in a moment of silence.  An amazing homage to a brilliant performance.  This is one that I will always cherish.

Speaking of his youth and the first time he understood what it meant that Black Africans were enslaved

Reading a letter from the contemporary journalist Horace Greeley criticizing his presidency--we also hear his witty, acid sharp response

Recreating Lincoln's recitation of the Gettysburg Address

At the end with the actual theater box where Lincoln was shot upper right.  Throughout there was a palpable sense that Lincoln's ghost was hovering, inspiring the performance.  The only kind of magic I believe in, theatre magic!

1st Stage: The Waverly Gallery

 Sometimes there is no quick.  The body forms, the limbs function, but life is missing.

I added this play to my season as an after-thought.  I do love a lot of the wonderful things that come out of this scrappy little theatre company housed over an auto repair shop literally in the shadows of new mega-gazillion dollar high rises and obscenely large shopping malls in the economic heart of Northern Virginia.  At times it can feel like lifting up a shoe-box in a ditch and discovering a pearl.  Unfortunately, this was not one of those times.  

I was drawn to add this show after seeing the cast, some fine actors, Catherine Flye, Sasha Olnick and one of my favorite new faces, Ethan J. Miller.  Plus, I was aware that on Broadway it won a Tony for best revival under the acting of Michael Cera and Elaine May.  Also, 1st Stage offers an insanely generous discount for teachers.  From the start there was an awkward uncertainty in the blocking.  The characters seemed disconnected.  Talking at and not to each other.  This devolved into talk over and through each other, and finally shouting at and past each other.  In the second act, there were a few sparks of light, a few moments of genuine connection, but by then it was too late to salvage.  The subject of the play is Alzheimer's and the struggle to accept what's happening to the already somewhat eccentric matriarch of the family.  It's not an easy subject to tackle, and with more and more people coming to the table with personal experience in the matter, a play that centers around confusion and dysfunction over compassion really doesn't have anything to say worth listening to.  

Knowing what I do of the talent pool, I can only surmise that the director was in over his head.  The incidentals were fine, felt the set designer missed an opportunity to push beyond realistic representations of spaces, the entrances to the dining room were poorly proportioned and made entrances and exists awkward for the actors at times.

They can't all be winners...

Gladys (Catherine Flye)

Gladys' daughter, Ellen (Lisa Hodsoll) and grandson, Daniel (Ethan J. Miller), and an artist, Don (Aaron Bliden) who happens upon the gallery and becomes a helper as Gladys struggles.

Gladys, Ellen, Daniel, Howard (Sasha Olnick), Gladys' son-in-law, and Don